I am reading the patent and it pretty much describes <i>any</i> large scale distributed multi-user application. Their patent is mostly "workflow" and "project" oriented, and I would think they would have had better chance trolling Google and MS for Docs and Office, not facebook. Even IBM for Lotus Domino.<p>Their platform "specs" are so widespread and so far ranging, it has every HPC acronym thrown at it. They even specify bits of the BIOS and EPROMs.<p>Who are these morons and why do they think FB is nothing <i>but</i> intuitive development dictated by growth and everyday contact with a huge user base? Anybody who is anybody would have come up with distributed caching of RDBMs queries, didn't someone implement Memcached at LiveJournal? and the rest of it is self-dictating.<p>Can you imagine being the FB engineers tasked with developing a platform for applications? the last thing you want to read are patents; they're mostly medieval sketches, and arm-chair monday-morning quarterback-engineering that you don't want your mental model cluttered with this crap. Instead, you poach competent people from your competitors (i.e. people who don't have the time to lay patent mines for posterity and instead have shit to do <i>today</i>)<p>A platform for managing information? get fucked!
In the tech woeld, patents should last just one year. Enough time to build and market your product and have the advantage of being first.<p>After that is open season for everybody to improve upon that patent, everybody wins.